You gotta love or hate google for this. One of my site they turned on this new experiment. It looks so bad (half space empty). Google please stop doing experiments on live sites. And don't tell me I'm running out of advertisers or my topic is not triggering ads.
mayest
6:06 pm on Jun 17, 2008 (gmt 0)
Ha! Last night on one of my pages I had only one ad at the top of the skyscraper. The rest was just white space. Fortunately the other pages had fully populated ad space.
fredw
8:48 pm on Jun 17, 2008 (gmt 0)
Google's been doing this for quite a long time, showing less than the full number of ads in an ad unit. Supposedly, it's done to maximize your ad value.
My sites are very tightly formatted and this bugged me at first, but you get used to it, and realize it only looks "broken" to you, the viewers of your page don't notice any difference.
sutrostyle
3:11 am on Jun 18, 2008 (gmt 0)
Same thing here. They do not have enough inventory, this is why ecpm has gone down 50-60% in 12 months. The deal wiht Yahoo will make it only worse, because they will cut out smaller publishers from even more inventory and thus dilute ecpms.